Ross Lusted from Sydney's The Bridge Room comes to Canberra for Good Food Month
Ross Lusted is one of Australia's most lauded chefs - and he's also a sculptor, painter, ceramicist, and a former hotel developer.
His restaurant the Bridge Room in Sydney has three chefs hats and is the Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide's Restaurant of the Year for 2016.
And he's coming to Canberra to cook with Ben Willis at Aubergine.
Lusted's cooking is fluid and modern, and the Bridge Room has won plaudits as much for its aethestic as his food but he says it is food that matters. "You win a whole lot of awards and that's fantastic," he says. "You've still got to eat [the meal], and enjoy it at the end of the day."
Willis is stoked that Lusted is coming to the capital. "I don't know really many dinners which have been had with chefs with his profile in Canberra," he says. "He's got a huge background in kitchens, it's very diverse, well travelled, he's got a huge food repertoire, the food that he's currently doing is modern, seasonal, a few Asian flavours and his menu is always changing and evolving."
With that in mind, it's likely that the Bridge Room-Aubergine dinner menu is still evolving even you read this. Both chefs are putting their minds to the dishes that will best make use of what's flourishing in farms and gardens at the moment.
"The hardest thing for us to do is put a menu together because we have so many changing options. He's not going to come here and just serve three signature dishes," Willis says. "All I know is I need to find a charcoal barbecue for him."
"When you keep going back to the grill, it's the centre of the kitchen, I'm South African, and I grew up with that," Lusted says.
The Canberra Times Good Food Month runs all through March. See canberra.goodfoodmonth.com